World News

Men deserve a break. Normal men.

Not the Mitchell Pearces' of the world, who are a disgrace, but the men who are trying to make a difference in our kids' lives every day. Men like our own husbands, brothers and sons.

Israel is lagging behind other Western countries with regard to gender balance in early childhood education, according to Dr. David Brody, academic dean at Efrata College of Education in Jerusalem.

More Scots men will be encouraged to take up a career as nursery teachers and childminders as part of a Scottish Government drive announced today.

Ministers today set out their vision for an overhaul of the country’s early years workforce which will also look at ensuring that the profession is better paid for those involved.

Just 4% of nursery teachers in Scotland are currently male and 0% of childminders. Ministers now want to shift this balance and believe it would have wider benefits for society.

My form teacher during my final year of primary school was called Dr Knight. A brilliant man who remained stoic when my friend tried to glue him to a chair, his specialism was maths.

My daughter was clearly excited when she came home from her first day at school last June. In between giggles, she blurted out, in Filipino, what seemed almost like a secret: “Our teacher is male.”

New research by the Australian Catholic University (ACU) of ABS Labour Force data has revealed that for the last 20 years as few as one in five Australian primary school teachers have been male.

The ACU reviewed the country's most populous states and found that in 2014:
 
16 per cent of NSW primary school teachers were men
18 per cent of Victorian primary school teachers were men

Many children will never encounter a male employee in their early years of care and education. Does it matter? Asker municipality in Norway has labored for many years to increase the number of men in childcare. It is our belief that children should be entitled to meet both men and women as teachers and caregivers.

To this end, we will be hosting an international conference in Asker 21-22 october.

Objectives:

My names Jeremy and I'm a 25 year old male working in a long day care centre. I have been doing so for about 6 years and have 2 modules left in my diploma and I'm smashing through it. I have had it for about 3 months and I'm nearly done. I'm just wondering if there are any other males on this website or males who work in your centers.

New Waikato primary teaching graduates are struggling to find work, with some schools seeing 100 applicants applying for the one job.

While Waikato high schools have the opposite problem - with trouble filling certain positions.

Teachers are being told they may need to be more flexible in where they live to secure a job, and many are having to start off in a fixed-term job to get to permanent one.

Mothers outnumbered fathers at our primary school sports day last week in the normal ratio for a day in the working week – maybe 10/1.

Among the staff and volunteers organising the event, however, women outnumbered men by more like 20/1.

Generally speaking, gender equality in the U.S. and other Western countries has involved women moving into men’s spheres.  We have not seen an equivalent migration of men into women’s spheres.  Accordingly, while women have integrated many male occupations (they are now, for example, 50% or more of law and medical students), many female-dominated ones remain heavily female.

A brief personal perspective

A number of years ago when I was teaching English to students of other languages in Hong Kong, I did some work for an internation kindergarten. My job was to create a programme to promote language for children who were about to leave for primary school. Having taught children of all ages at primary and secondary levels, I particularly enjoyed my time with the kindergarten group and decided to pursue a career as an early childhood teacher.

A new scheme has been set up to help encourage more men to enter the childcare profession in Lancashire.

The Lancashire Men in Childcare Network has been established by Andrew Clifford, managing director of the First Class Childcare Group, which has bases in Barrow, Whalley, Accrington and Clayton-le-Moors.

My husband recently moved abroad with work, returning on average for a week every month. We joke that he’s a tourist in the family, but it’s not always funny.

The Ministry of Education appears at a loss as to how to resolve the chronic shortage of male teachers, a challenge hampered by both red flags and red tape.

Despite a public relations offensive from the ministry, the number of male teachers in both primary and secondary schools has continued to drop during the past 10 years.